High Spots of the Far East (1932)
** (out of 4)
Fair entry in the early "World Adventures" series from Vitaphone is probably going to be unfairly judge (by myself included) as James A. FitzPatrick would turn out the same thing in future years in much better quality. Those TravelTalks shorts would also benefit from their Technicolor, which of course is missing here. The short takes us to various places in the Far East including various palaces in Siam, the Temple of 500 Buddhas in Japan and a visit to the Pearl River in China. The film might lack the Technicolor but the B&W cinematography is one of the real high points as the visual look of the film is quite nice. All of the places we visit actually look very good in their B&W but a few of the places, like Siam, were later visited by FitzPatrick and his crew. What doesn't work is the narration and some of the stuff we're told. We're given very little information on the places we visit and what we are told is often times laughable. For example, when we visit China we're told that what we're looking at is as "Chinese" as China can get. Oh, really? If you have eight-minutes to kill then this isn't too bad but this travelogue genre would get much better in future years.